Monday, May 12, 2014

Microsoft confirmed that Azure ExpressRoute connections will be available with partners AT&T, BT, Equinix, Level 5, TeleCity, SingTel and Verizon. Azure ExpressRoute ensures private connections between Azure data centers and on-premise infrastructure or colocation facilities by using an MPLS VPN or other secure tunnel.

Azure Virtual Network now supports more than one site-to-site VPN connection. This enables customers to securely connect multiple on-premises locations. With new VNET-to-VNET connectivity, multiple virtual networks can be directly and securely linked to one another for disaster prevention. Another new capability is IP Reservation, which allows the customer to reserve public IP addresses and use them as virtual IP addresses—ideal for applications that need static public IP addresses or when there is a need to swap reserved IP addresses to update applications.

Azure Traffic Manager, now generally available, supports both Azure & external endpoints, for building highly available applications across Azure and on-premises.

Also effective today, two new compute-intensive virtual machine instances — A8 and A9 — came online. Microsoft said these instances bring faster processors and interconnectivity, more virtual cores, and larger memory.

Microsoft also introduced a preview of Azure Files, a new technology that simplifies how files can be shared in the cloud across applications and services.

Other networking highlights from Microsoft's TechEd North America event conference in Houston include the Azure Site Recovery preview for disaster recovery and the Azure Antimalware to protect VMs and services running Azure. Microsoft is planning further enhanced data-loss prevention and encryption technologies for Office 365 customers.